Annotated Assessment Exemplar

Algebra 2 Solving Equations Quick Check

1. How would you describe the design of this assessment? This assignment is called a Quick Check, it is a 5 point multiple choice assessment presented at the end of a lesson on solving equations.
2. What is the purpose of the assessment? The purpose of this assessment is to gather information about the skills that students have learned during this lesson and how well they are able to apply those skills to solve problems.
3. What assumptions have you made about this assessment? This assessment is appropriate for learning whether students are able to work through a problem from start to finish correctly and are able to get the right answer. This assessment is not appropriate for gathering information about the steps students take to solve a problem, and specifically what they did correctly and where mistakes were made.
4. Compare the assessment to the "three things you believe." I do believe that this assessment is compatible with my belief that assessments should be done frequently, because this is a short assignment to assess students math skills after a single lesson. Although this assessment doesn't offer much in terms of interacting with students, seeing their work and getting a good idea of their understanding, it is an asynchronous tool that can be very informative for a teacher to see where their students are at after a lesson.
5. Compare the assessment to the Module 1 material. To answer this question, the following statement in the Learn section of this module under social constructivism came to mind: "Well, if learning is an active and social process of meaning making that is influenced by a range of contextual and affective variables, it would seem that our approach to assessing what has been learned should be much more complex and multifaceted than a single test." I do think that this quick check is a great assessment tool, however I also believe that it needs to be combined with other methods for assessing student knowledge in order to truly learn what math skills students possess.